Channels

Services

The H Roundup - Adblocker accusations, open backdoors and Xiph codecs

Welcome to The H Roundup, your review of the week with the most read news on The H, the security alerts and open source releases, and the essential feature articles – all in one quick-to-scan news item. This week: Adblocker accusations, open backdoors in backup boxes from HP, Xiph's latest codec, what's coming in Linux 3.10, the free software world post-Prism and Opera's malware problem.

Top News

A number of allegations were made over the business behind Adblock Plus, a real backdoor was discovered in HP backup systems which demonstrated the danger of tech support "access" and Xiph unveiled the early work it has been doing to create a next-next-generation video codec to take on H.265.

Raspberry Pi owners got a beta of XBian 1.0, an XBMC-centric Linux distribution, The H's Open Recall looked at FreeBSD on the PlayStation 4 and future changes in systemd, and, Mozilla released Firefox 22 with JavaScript boosting OdinMonkey and full WebRTC support.

Surprising some who thought it was already open source, Citrix open sourced the XenServer platform. Also more economically available, unfortunately in this case, was the Carberp banking malware which has now been leaked onto file sharing networks. Android phone owners looking for an alternative ROM can now get their hands on CyanogenMod 10.1 which will have monthly releases going forward.

Adobe open sourced its C/C++ to Flash compiler, for those still using Flash as a development platform, and the first release candidate of LibreOffice 4.1 landed ready for the bug hunters to do their work.

Features

In a world where every government is spying on everyone and where new revelations and old insecurities arrive in the press, what does free software, and the organisations and communities around it, need to do in the post-PRISM world? Glyn Moody looks at some possibilities.

Security Alerts

WordPress users should have updated to get a solid batch of fixes for a variety of vulnerabilities. Opera users will need to give their systems a scan after a break into Opera's systems meant malware signed with an expired Opera signature was pushed into the update system.